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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Mind
Products
Evolves
Thinking
Land
Ethic
Written
Presented
Community
Evolve
Social
Ethics
Ever
Product
Nothing
Evolution
Important
Minds
Purposely

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
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One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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...to any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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In wildness is the salvation of the world.
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
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The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress our opponents do not.
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
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This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled farmers who have spent their lives destroying land now carrying water by hand to their new plantations
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Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
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